voice assistants

The virtual assistant is being offered to owners of the Nest Cam IQ in a free update rolling out today. The move comes just two weeks after Nest moved back under Google’s direct control after spending nearly 2 1/2 years as a separate company owned by the same parent, Alphabet Inc. The $300 Nest Cam will give Google another potentially valuable earhole in its battle with Amazon and Apple to build digital command centers in people’s home.

Propelled by what we can legitimately call The Alexa Movement, voice is now perceived as the future of the User Interface. But we need numbers: How many of us continue to use Alexa (or Siri, or Google assistant) after the novelty has worn off? What do we use it for? This will help us understand the likely actual future of Voice UI.

As brands increasingly seek to understand the Internet of Things, marketers are keying in on how Amazon and Google will dominate connected devices in 2018. That’s why Amazon’s Alexa and the Google Home — with their rapidly expanding sets of AI skills and services — will be completely unavoidable for the 180,000 expected attendees at this week’s annual CES in Las Vegas.

I’m finding my new Google Home Mini is more than a novelty. It’s another platform for accessing media — and it’s as a media platform that it interests me most. That’s what should interest TV broadcasters as creators of mostly news content. Some broadcasters have already plunged in. More need to experiment because these devices aren’t going away — eMarketer predicts that by 2019 there will be 54.4 million “smart speakers” in use in the U.S.

Publishers have been enthusiastic about voice assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant this year, often undaunted by the fact that these platforms require bespoke content, and the route to monetization is still unclear. After promising levels of its audience returned each week to use its Alexa skill, CNBC’s global ad sales team will start selling audio sponsorship packages to advertisers in the next few months.